No Telling How Much

It used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that's not true anymore.

In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling of beers' alcohol potencies for fear of "strength wars" breaking out among competitive brewers. Ironically, some sixty years later when light beers and low-alcohol beers were becoming popular, brewers wanted the right to brag about how little alcohol their products contained, and they challenged the "no tell" law. In 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the labeling ban violated the First Amendment by interfering with the brewers' right to free speech.

[Robert L. Wolke, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2002), p. 248.]

Posted on July 21, 2005 at 11.13 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, Plus Ca Change...

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